Guild Wars 2

Was doing Claw of Jormag event last night (Claw-lag is more appropriate), and I was getting incredible amounts of lag at times when I’m usually lag-free (or maybe high-200 ping).

I finished the event and went to another map to find that the lag disappeared. :o I don’t have any noticeable rubberbanding like I did last night at any other time in Frostgorge, but it appeared to be map-wide. Even while harvesting nodes there was a noticeable delay.

So, thanks to our recently-implemented ping display in the F11 options main screen (WAY past due IMO), my screenshot confirms the massive amount of lag. This was taken in between phase 1 & 2 of the Claw event. Dealing with high-200’s and low-300’s is something I sadly have been accustomed to, thanks to distance/geography (living in Australia). Having to deal with pings in the 1000’s or worse is something no one should have to put up with.

But how do we know the problem wasn’t just you? Surely you aren’t suggesting everyone in the map had thousands of ping, no?

https://www.pingplotter.com/

Use this, and check in Resource Monitor to see what IP addresses to enter into it. You can do this by doing the following:
1) Right-click task bar and select “Start Task Manager”
2) When it opens switch from the Applications tab to the Performance tab
3) Click on the button with the icon for administrator privileges that says “Resource Monitor,” which will open another window
4) With Resource Monitor open, switch from the Overview tab to the Network tab
5) Look under the TCP connections section

Now with this, you’re able to see all of the applications that are currently sending/receiving data, what your latency (ms) for each process is, and what their remote addresses (IP addresses) are. You should see three for gw2.exe. One of them is for the game server, and it’s likely going to be the one that has the highest value for latency.

Take the remote address corresponding to the process for GW2 that’s lagging the most and enter it into PingPlotter and let it do its magic. You will probably end up seeing packet loss in a few areas.

To give you the general idea of what to interpret from it when you do this, if you see packet loss on the very last addresses that have “ncsoft” in them, then the problem is not on your end. If you see the problem during one of the first few addresses, like the one that represents your router etc, then you know the issue IS on your end. If you see packet loss in the middle and see some strange addresses that have things like “telia.net” in them, then what that means is that your ISP is routing you through a “middleman” which is where your data is being lost, thus causing the packet loss and the extreme lag. All you can do about that is trying VPNs or possibly consider getting a different ISP.

I’ve already done everything suggested above. The very reason I say it wasn’t me was because:

• as I mentioned, it was the wrong time of day for me to get lag (peak times were 12 hours ago)
• already traced my ping and found no local issues
• if you’ll read my post a bit more carefully, I also said that I had this lag ONLY in Frostgorge Sound and no other maps. Now we know for a fact that each map has its own server IP. For me to walk out of one map with high ping and into another with ‘normal’ ping suggests that it isn’t on my end.

Pingplotter won’t work because it’s doing essentially the same thing as I’m doing with the ‘trace’ (pathping command in DOS), and what the domain that controls the services that leave our shores (telstraglobal.net) has done is to block traces so they don’t get ping-flooded. My local ISP helpdesk guy told me the story of why they do it and it makes sense.

Living in Australia it’s natural but unfortunate that I do get packet loss, which is inevitable with virtually ANY Aussie ISP communicating with servers halfway around the world. Sometimes that packet loss is minimal and manageable, other times it’s a complete disaster.

Fair enough, but the way that your first post is worded makes it seem like you noticed it happening in Frostgorge and then it suddenly stopped soon after when you left, not that you have reliably tested it so that it only happens when you enter the map. If that’s the case then I think I will have to agree with you about it probably not being an issue locally.

What region and server do you play on?

My next suggestion for you would be to try seeing if guesting to another server at all makes a difference. I’ve actually heard rumors about this happening — certain WvW borderlands having severe lag issues for specific servers. I’ve just never actually confirmed it to be true for myself.

It could very well be the same problem as described above.

I’ve been on SoS since beta. Arguably the largest Oceanic server presence (largest concurrency anyway).

What happens when I start an event, only to realise that the ping is out of control? I go back to the character select screen, guest to a different server, where usually the event has been and gone. Yes I could use the LFG tool and join on a party in a late instance if there’s one available, but chances are I’ll just get put back onto SoS again.